Help! WinXP Boot Issue!

J

Jman

n00b
Joined
May 5, 2003
Messages
17
Well, my computer was going flaky on me....doing odd crap, so I did a clean wipe of both drives that had OSes on them (one was Vista RC1, the other XP). Installed XP, got everything in XP working fine, but when I boot, if the XP setup disk is not in a drive, I get a "Startup disk not found" error when I boot. I tried Fixboot with no success. Windows XP will load just fine if the setup disk is in the drive...even when it isn't booted from, but if it ISN'T in the drive, I can't get to Windows.

I am assuming that FixMBR is probably the way to solve this, but the warning is pretty darn scary, and the MS Knowledge base doesn't even indicate whether or not it will fix my problem.

One thing to note is that my OS is installed to the D drive (why it couldn't have made that C, I don't know, but before, it was E and worked fine, so I'm kind of stumped).

So, what's the best (and safest) way to do this. I have 4 hard drives total in the system...two SATA and two IDE. The OS is on the smaller of the SATA drives, if you need that.
 
Have you ever had any troubles with the heck of a warning they give? (May make all partitions inaccessible, etc.)
 
Ok, so I tried FIXMBR....no dice. It successfully rewrote the MBR, but I still get the boot error when the setup disk isn't in the drive.

Honestly, this whole issue makes no sense to me...why would it boot with the setup disk in the drive, when I'm NOT booting from the setup disk?
 
Yes, I have. It's very odd, as this is a fresh install. I wiped both drives (full format) that had OSes on them when I did this reinstall, then did a full fresh install. It's very odd.

Interestingly enough, in the Disk Managment window on the computer managment tool, it lists my C drive as the system drive, and the drive with XP as the boot drive. The drive with XP SHOULD be the boot drive, and the C drive being labeled as a system drive is very odd to me, as it has NEVER had an OS on it, in all the years I've owned the drive.
 
Problem solved, folks!

Essentially, my C: drive, which has no OS on it, has the system files, including the boot.ini and ntldr, etc. They of course point to my D: drive with the OS on it. A quick switch in HD boot priority from the drive with XP on it to the drive with the boot.ini crap on it, and I'm good to go. Amazing how such a simple oversight can lead to such frustration. :)
 
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